Garry Wills

What Friends Are For

For decades Justice Clarence Thomas has received lavish gifts from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. What’s Crow been getting in return?

The Court Kills

Why do we slaughter our own children? Because the Supreme Court condones it.

‘Don’t Call Me a Saint’

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day rejected canonization for herself. Now revived, this bad idea would only diminish the great founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

Three Myths About Impeachment

Hamilton is clear that impeachment is meant to stop any “abuse of power” by “pernicious measures.” If actual crime is an issue, that can be punished by the courts after Congress has stopped the abuse by removing the offender (the first necessary task).

My Education in the Patriarchy

Raise any part of our society to a more just condition and justice for women is centrally at issue. It is the reform of all reforms and the basic measure of our progress.

Changing the ‘Changeless’ Church

The Rights of Guns

“Gun rights,” as used by devotees of an absolutist Second Amendment, means their right to own guns. But as used in real American life these days, it means the rights of guns. Guns themselves possess even more rights than persons do.

The City That Wouldn’t Die

Resistance Means More Than Voting

When former president Barack Obama called on the nation to oppose Donald Trump last week, he said there was only one way to do it, by voting. That is a plausible argument, one that has been used in the past to oppose every kind of civil disobedience. Vote, of course. But there is no reason to think that voting is the sole allowable form of resistance.

The Priesthood of The Big Crazy

Many victims of abuse by priests have made the mistake of reporting their charges to a bishop. They should have gone straight to a secular authority. To expect from the celibate clergy either candor or good sense on sexual matters is a fool’s game.

The Art of the Schmooze

On Studs Terkel

A Wild and Indecent Book

Big Rocket Man

Who will stop Trump?

Where Evangelicals Came From

Frances FitzGerald’s ‘The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America’

The Church: For Better and for Worse

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

The Emperor’s Hairdo

Donald Trump’s signature hairdo is so prominent that cartoonists use it as a shorthand identifier in their drawings. But what does it say about the man?

Jesuits Admirable and Execrable

The Nativity Crowd

There are only three Neapolitan Baroque crèches in America—at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Chicago Art Institute.

Disciples of Distrust

What has caused the bitter disillusion that has created Trump’s following? It is the burrowing and undermining infection of the Iraq war—the longest in our history, one that keeps upsetting order abroad and at home.